Performance Benchmarks

Performance Playground

So far, specifications of Honeycomb tablets haven't varied much and most feature an NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core 1GHz processor and 1GB of RAM. For this section, we will put the Lenovo IdeaPad Tablet K1 against two Android slates, the ASUS Eee Pad Slider and the Motorola Xoom to assess its performance. We chose to show the Eee Pad Slider because it runs on the same Android 3.1 version as the K1. Of course, how can we forget Apple's iPad 2? The following benchmarks are used for raw performance evaluation:-

Quadrant evaluates the CPU, memory, I/O and 3D graphics performance. This is an Android OS based test.

Smartbench 2011 is a multi-core friendly benchmark application that includes both the Productivity and Games Indices for a more complete gauge of the overall performance of Android devices.

SunSpider JavaScript benchmark measures the browsing performance of the tablet.

How the Tablets Stack up

Device

Lenovo IdeaPad Tablet K1

ASUS Eee Pad Slider

Motorola Xoom

Apple iPad 2

CPU

NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core 1GHz

NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core 1GHz

NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core 1GHz

Apple A5 dual-core 1GHz

GPU

ULP GeForce

ULP GeForce

ULP GeForce

PowerVR SGX 543MP2

RAM

1GB

1GB

1GB

512MB

OS

Google Android 3.1

Google Android 3.1

Google Android 3.0

Apple iOS 4.3

With similar hardware components, it is not surprising to see that the tablets' performance are almost on-par with one another. There is no clear leader among the three Android tablets, although the Motorola Xoom seems to be in the lead as far as raw figures are concerned. However, user experience (in terms of processing, gaming and general responsiveness) are pretty much uniform across the slates. As such, the scores above aren't much to be concerned about.

In terms of web browser performance, all the tablets are roughly about the same although the Lenovo IdeaPad Tablet K1 falls behind the pack. Do take note that the above benchmarks are conducted with stock firmwares, hence the results do not reflect day-to-day usage conditions of the tablet.

Just like the performance numbers earlier, the results from SunSpider aren't something one should be overly concerned about when actual usage doesn't really reflect our benchmark findings. During our time with the Lenovo IdeaPad Tablet K1, the user experience was similar to what we have seen on other Android tablets. Internet browsing was generally fine and with Adobe Flash support, it still has an edge over the Apple iPad 2 - just like the other Android tablets.

However, there was this recurring incident of the tablet freezing and crashing on us. This happened at the lock screen on numerous occasions as we were unable to unlock the tablet. Pressing and holding the Power button didn't help either. On a few occasions, the K1 even rebooted on its own without warning! So far, we've not been able to diagnose this but we've informed Lenovo to investigate on this. Once any updates on this come about, we'll update this section as well as in our forum.